None.
1. Field of the Invention
The concept of a xe2x80x9cprocessxe2x80x9d is well known. In life, processes abound. Some are naturalxe2x80x94as in the conception, gestation and birth of a child. Some are formulated and established by individuals in their daily livesxe2x80x94a person preparing for the start of a workday by going through a series of steps starting with awakening and ending with arrival on the job. A Process is a collection or series of related steps.
It is advantageous that 1) a process be comprised of consecutively performable steps; 2) the instructions on how to perform a process be a part of the Process itself; 3) that a step be capable of holding documents; and that 4) when documents are stored in or removed from or altered during a step, the resulting documents are immediately available to all physically linked steps, which may include steps of other processes.
The title of a step in a process should be the primary function to be performed and should preferably begin with a one-word action verb such as xe2x80x98submit . . . xe2x80x99 or xe2x80x98receive . . . xe2x80x99 or xe2x80x98gather . . . xe2x80x99. Further, as a user enters a step of a process, the user should have at hand any necessary documents, accumulated from set-aside documents of predecessor steps and documents found directly in the step about to be performed. It should be pointed out that a step of a process may be devoid of documents or contain xe2x80x98nullxe2x80x99 documents such that only the action provided by the step is necessary to accomplish the step. Such a step of a process might be: xe2x80x98Verify that the lights are on in the warehousexe2x80x99.
If the documents of a step within a process are to be used by any steps within any other related processes, it is of great value to have the steps linked, so that the documents developed by one step are readily available to other linked steps without further physical movement of developed documents. In this sense, a Process is a collection of documentsxe2x80x94multiply titled by action verbs, each of which represents an ordered step of a Process in which said documents are acted upon.
2. Description of the Related Art
Process Management often involves the development of documents. A well-established approach of prior art is to focus on the efficient collection and organization of documents for ease of accessibility by the use of organizers, while the instructions on how to process such documents are kept separate from the documents themselves. A process management system is most often comprised of two separate major pieces; 1) the apparatus or the set of devices employed to develop documents and 2) the xe2x80x98how toxe2x80x99 instructions or method(s) on how to employ the apparatus. Therefore, most often, a user must come to a process management with some prior instructional knowledge on how to perform the associated process or processes.
It is therefore the objective of the present invention to overcome the drawback of the prior art and to provide a Process Management System that: 1) has the instructions on how to perform the process built into the execution of the Process itself; 2) establishes process steps that are consecutively ordered for ease of execution; 3) allows for the storage within process steps of developed; and 4) through a mechanism of linking steps of processes allows for the presentation of relevant documents to one step that were developed in other steps without separate retrieval by a current step. The present invention makes the process procedure an integral part of the documents that may be developed during the process and related processes that may utilize some of the same documents.
In addition, during the invention process of the Process Management System, a host of sub-inventions that further enhance the capabilities of the Process Management System was developed and will be discussed. In addition, these subinventions can stand alone as organizational enhancement products in any number of other related venues.
The present invention combines into a single system the method and means of managing the dispositions of documents as they move through their life-cycles under the control of a processes.
These and other related objectives are achieved according to the invention by a system that provides for performing the consecutively-ordered steps of a process and making resulting acted-upon documents readily available to subsequent linked steps comprising the same or other processes.
The embodiment chosen for invention illustration uses: 1) a standard ring binder with tabbed dividers as the organizer and 2) a student""s academic day as the systematization targetxe2x80x94having documents as the systematized documents. Because the invention is a xe2x80x98Process Management Systemxe2x80x99, it is obvious that many embodiments of the invention are possiblexe2x80x94covering many Process-based applicationsxe2x80x94without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention.
Other objects and features of the present invention will become apparent from the following detailed description considered in connection with the accompanying drawings. It is to be understood, however, that the drawings are designed as an illustration only and not as a definition of the limits of the invention.